From Afghanistan to Syria, the tireless photojournalist Lynsey Addario has
risked her life to tell stories from the world's most dangerous places. She
sheds light on her unique career

There is a buzz in the audience at the Frontline Club in west London, the legendary hang-out for war correspondents, where the photographer Lynsey Addario is being interviewed on the stage. The news has leaked out that a film is to be made of her autobiography, to be directed by Steven Spielberg and to star Jennifer Lawrence.Addario is uncharacteristically indirect about this, saying only that ‘some sort of movie’ will be made, but you can ‘never confirm anything in Hollywood’. It is inevitable that this sort of thing will bring her a lot of attention, just as it is inevitable that despite an impressive body of work, it was not until she was kidnapped in Libya in 2011 that publishers started pursuing her with book offers.

Addario is 41. In 2009 she won a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship, and the year before was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for The New York Times for its ‘Talibanistan’ series. She has worked in Afghanistan, Iraq, Congo, Darfur, Libya, Syria and Lebanon but, she says, she is not a war photographer; she describes herself as ‘a photo-journalist who works mostly in conflict zones’.

Addario has all the criteria for being a war photographer – guts and stamina, persistence and patience – but her photographs are about much more than being in the right place at the right time. Her compositions are exquisite, and she specialises in dispelling myths and stereotypes. Much of her work concerns human-rights abuses and injustice perpetrated against women.

Her book is called It’s What I Do – and the title says everything about her. Her epiphany as a photo-grapher came, she says, when she realised she ‘was bearing witness to things first-hand that were shaping policy, shaping our world view as a society, and it is very hard to walk away from that. What started out as me being curious about how Afghan women coped under the Taliban was suddenly on the front page of The New York Times– so Bush and the policy makers could see the fruits of their decisions. Then it becomes responsibility: How can I not go? It would be irresponsible not to. What else would I do? Take pictures of weddings? It’s sort of an addiction to bearing witness to things and acting as the messenger for people who cannot actually get their message out.’

Addario working in the Gaza strip in 2011 while eight months pregnant (Courtesy Lynsey Addario)

We are in a cafe in Islington, London, and Addario is explaining to me what she looks for when she is editing her pictures. She usually knows, she says, when she is shooting if she has hit that zone where it all comes together: ‘If the light’s good, if people have forgotten that I’m there, if it seems authentic and encapsulates a story. What we’re looking for as photographers is to try and tell a story with each image and to round out each of those images in a comprehensive essay.

‘So if I’m doing a story on how a single mother copes in a refugee camp, I’ll go to her tent, I’ll follow her when she’s working, see what her daily life is like and try to pack that into one composition, with nice light, in one frame. It’s very seldom that all those things come together; it’s like an epiphany – so when it happens I can feel it in every part of my body. Sometimes I will literally gasp, because it’s a very visceral thing for me.’

In 2008 she was given a grant by Columbia College to document gender-based violence and rape as a weapon of war, and she spent weeks photographing and interviewing women in Congo who were simply casualties of their birthplace. ‘They had nothing when they were born and would have nothing when they died,’ she writes. ‘I interviewed dozens and dozens of African women who had endured more hardship and trauma than most Westerners even read about, and they ploughed on. I often openly cried during interviews, unable to process this violence and hatred towards women I was witnessing.’

There is a photograph of hers taken in eastern Congo in 2008, of Kahindo, a 20-year-old with her two children born out of rape, who had been kidnapped by Rwandan soldiers and held in the bush for almost three years. She is sitting with her children and looking out of her tent, and the light gives it an ethereal, radiant quality but the image is suffused with melancholy.

This was such a tragic case, Addario says. ‘You’re talking about gang rape, and women who were slashed to pieces by bayonets. So I was trying hard to make images that would stop people in their tracks and make them think about what was happening. As a photographer who is constantly in violent, bloody situations where the instinct is to turn away, I am always trying to figure out how to make people not turn away. For me it’s about engaging. We are so inundated with pictures of violence and death – we are seeing videos of people being beheaded. How do you take a subject like that and make it so that it draws people in? That’s the real challenge.’

Kahido, 20, at home with her two children born of rape, in eastern Congo, 2008 (Lynsey Addario/Getty Images Reportage)

Addario grew up in Connecticut in an Italian-American family. Her parents, Philip and Camille, were both hairdressers, and they had four daughters. Lynsey is the youngest. Their house, she says, was rambling and lawless and fun, filled with eccentrics and transvestites. ‘The school PTA would tell parents not to let their kids go to our home, but we were the happiest household on the planet.’

One of her parents’ friends was Bruce, a manager from Bloomingdale’s. In 1982, when Addario was eight, Camille told her daughters that their father had fallen in love with Bruce and had moved to New York with him. ‘My dad didn’t leave us high and dry, but when he opened his own salon most of the staff went with him, so my mom was in a really difficult situation.’ They had to move house, and Lynsey’s mother couldn’t pay the bills so had to sell her car. ‘For many years I was very loyal to my mother but when I was old enough to analyse what happened I would rather that my father was with the person he loves. No one in my family bears grudges.’

It was her father who gave Addario her first camera, a Nikon FG, when she was 13. A friend of her mother’s taught her how to develop and print film, and she continued photographing throughout her university years – in Wisconsin, where she majored in international relations, and in Bologna, where she studied economics and political science.

She moved to New York, where she earned enough money waitressing to travel, then to Buenos Aires, where she got small local assignments, and then, inspired by Sebastião Salgado’s work, she decided to dedicate herself to photojournalism. Back in the States in 1996, she was taken on by Associated Press, and her career progressed steadily from there. She photographed families in Cuba and transgender prostitutes in New York, along the way becoming a stringer for The New York Times.

In 2000 she went to Afghanistan to photograph the life of women under the little-known Taliban who had taken over 90 per cent of the country. Here she honed her skills at establishing a rapport with her subjects and winning their trust. Over several visits she built up a unique body of work.

At the time no one was interested in Afghanistan, but the following year, after 9/11, it all kicked off, and it was in Peshawar that she got her big break with The New York Times. She was always clad in a burka, but doing her work was not easy. At an anti-American demonstration in Peshawar with fellow photojournalists she found herself trapped in a crowd and being aggressively groped by everyone around her, despite being dressed according to Islamic custom. She tried looking her tormentors in the eye and saying ‘haram’ (which means ‘forbidden’ or ‘shameful’) but when that didn’t work she turned round and whacked one perpetrator sharply on the head with her 5lb 12in camera lens. She saw his eyes roll back in his head and she ran back to the car, where, she writes in her book, ‘I found my male colleagues, lounging, all of them smitten with their afternoon’s work, checking the backs of their digital cameras for their prize-winning photographs, completely oblivious to what I had gone through to compose even one frame.’

In 2004 she went to Darfur with the New York Times correspondent Somini Sengupta to cover the war between the Sudanese government and the rebel militias. It was a fast-developing story of potential genocide, which the government was denying. She hoped that heart-rending images from Sudan on the front page of The New York Times might motivate the UN and NGOs to respond. ‘This was one of the few times I actually witnessed the correlation between persistent coverage and the response to that coverage by the international community,’ she says. She went back to Sudan many times.

For the next few years, she hurtled from one intense assignment to another – she was abducted in Iraq, took tea with Taliban warlords and had a serious car crash in Pakistan. In 2007, when the Afghanistan conflict had dragged on for some years, Addario and her friend the writer Elizabeth Rubin were seeking to be embedded with American troops for a feature on civilian casualties and collateral damage for The New York Times Magazine. ‘We wanted to go to the most dangerous place in the country,’ she says.

That was Korengal Valley, known as the cradle of jihad. By then Addario was experienced at embeds but there were many remarkable things about this trip, not least being the fact that by the time they got there, Rubin was three months pregnant, a secret that she kept from everybody except Addario. When they arrived in Jalalabad to meet the 173rd Airborne Brigade they were received with ‘the familiar look that every male soldier tried to conceal without success: ugh, girls’.

Injured soldiers are taken to a medevac helicopter after a Taliban ambush 2007 (Lynsey Addario/Getty Images Reportage)

War had changed. In the operations room at Camp Blessing a wall of screens provided real-time feeds of hostile activity. Via infrared drone feed screens, the commanders were able to distinguish between the living and non-living based on their heat signatures. Addario and Rubin could watch the war unfold, and when a 500lb bomb was dropped from an AC-130 aircraft the Taliban fighters disintegrated in front of their eyes.

The next day Addario and Rubin went to the medical tent at the Korengal outpost to see some of the civilian casualties who had come to be treated by the military. One of them was a boy called Khalid. ‘His family told us he had been injured the night before by the bomb, so I took his photo,’ Addario says. ‘His injuries looked like abrasions, he had glassy bloodshot eyes and was completely catatonic. I asked the medic if the injuries were consistent with bombing and shrapnel. He was very military and non-specific – and that is so typical of the theatre of war; there is so much mistrust. I remember going back to my tent and writing in the caption, “The medic says he cannot ascertain for certain…” and I meant to flesh it out later, when I edited the pictures.’

It was a very tough couple of months, involving daily six-hour patrols, sometimes carrying loads of up to 50lb, and Addario being caught in a firefight that resulted in the loss of several close comrades. Months later, when the article was about to go to press and the picture of Khalid was destined for the cover, Addario got a call saying the editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine had been in touch with the military Public Affairs office, which couldn’t verify 100 per cent that Khalid had been wounded in a Nato bombing. They wanted to pull the picture.

‘Every soldier who had been in the medical tent and at the base that morning assumed that Khalid was injured in the bombing the night before,’ Addario says. Furious and disillusioned, she wrote an email to the editor in chief: ‘… After all I have done to get these images of war… please stick your neck out in the most minimal way. To hear that you don’t want to “risk further scrutiny” after I risked my life for two months is the most offensive thing I have ever heard… We have a responsibility to put out material we get, not cower and question ourselves and worry about military scrutiny.… We owe it to the Afghans, the soldiers, everyone we spent time with and promised to show the TRUTH.’

In person, Lynsey Addario is a cool customer. She is direct and open and appears to be so driven that it is almost a relief to read of some of her more human transgressions. In 2001 Addario flew 9,000 miles back to Mexico from Peshawar in order to see Uxval, her Mexican lover who had dumped her, missing the fall of Kabul, which she had to watch on television. Her love life was a story of men unhappy about having to come second to her work, until she met Paul, now her husband, who at the time worked for Reuters in Turkey.

She has spent much of her life very close to death. Fortunately her parents were initially oblivious to the danger she was in. ‘I come from a big family of hairdressers; they didn’t read newspapers,’ she says. ‘I would say, “I’m off to Afghanistan…” and they would say, “Have fun!”’

There are many occasions, Addario thinks, when it was her instinct that saved her. ‘But that instinct can run out. And who knows if I have survived because of instinct or because I am lucky.’ In Libya, in March 2011, she and a small group of journalists and photographers were kidnapped. Their driver was a young student called Mohammed. It was a terrain unlike any other, there was a checkpoint and there was nowhere to hide. ‘We had many signs indicating that we should leave but we lingered too long. And Mohammed died.’ She looks at me evenly. ‘That’s our fault. That’s no one else’s fault. He could have upped and left but he didn’t. He paid with his life.’

Mohammed was shot at the checkpoint by Gaddafi’s supporters; Addario and her colleagues were tied up and bundled into cars. She was blindfolded, beaten and held for two days, before being released into the hands of the Libyan government, which held them all for a further four days before they were allowed to go home. During this time they had no idea whether or not they would survive.

After the kidnap something changed for Addario, and when her friends the photographers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed in Libya, she finally decided it was time to step back; she was happy with Paul and they wanted a baby.

Addario now lives in Islington with Paul and their three-year-old son, Lukas. She has made some compromises – ‘I certainly would be taking more risks than I do now if I didn’t have my family’ – and she limits her assignments to two weeks. But Addario has no intention of stopping work. Next week she is off to Saudi Arabia. It’s what she does.

It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War by Lynsey Addario (Corsair) can be ordered for £18 plus £1.99 p&p. Call 0844-871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk